


Between The Desire And The Spasm

by deMontague



Series: The Places Where We Find Our Pieces [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Character Study, Emotional Hurt, F/M, Gen, Max Is Damaged, Max Needs A Hug, Mental Illness, Missing Scene, Self-Reflection, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-12
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-13 09:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5703034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deMontague/pseuds/deMontague
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow. This is the way the world ends." -T.S. Eliot</p>
<p>Max reflects on many things after he walks away from the Citadel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My first fanwork. Very much a continuing work in progress.
> 
> Thank you for all the kind words and encouragement.

 

>  "Those who have crossed  
>  With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom  
>  Remember us-if at all-not as lost  
>  Violent souls, but only  
>  As the hollow men  
>  The stuffed men."
> 
> -T.S. Eliot 

* * *

 He doesn't keep track of time, hasn't for so long that the days and the months...Even the years don't matter anymore. The knife sharp edges of his own personal grief and pain have worn down to dull points that only ache when the light is just so, or when the wind carries some scent he knows by sense memory alone. Lost names and faces blur together into a sea of grey indistinct from the wasteland.

No, he doesn't keep track. At least not in a way that would make sense to anyone outside his own skull. He measures litres, guzzoline and water alike. He measures in bullet casings and rubber treads. He measures by the length of his hair and the thinning leather of his boots and by how many more times he can patch this shirt before he has to salvage another one.

He doesn't know how many years he has, only that he was young and then, like a switch of the old electric, he wasn’t. How many years _has_ it been? There must be a very great many of them, because some days he can feel every single one of them dragging behind him like a salvage trailer with a seized wheel.

This day, he wakes up hard and fighting, his body tense and his hands tightly fisted as if he could fight off the misty spectres behind his eyelids. He hasn't been sleeping well (not that he ever does, mind - his ghosts haunt his dreams more than his waking hours) since he dozed in the War Rig. He can admit, to his secret innermost self, that he had slept better there than he had in years. He isn't ready though, might never be, to think that through, to turn it over in his brain and determine just why, exactly, that was.

He doesn't keep track of time yet he knows, inexplicably, that it has been some twenty days since he left them. Twenty days since he left _Her_. Twenty days of self-doubt and something that might feel like regret if he remembered how to recognize it.

He doesn't let himself think too hard about the indecision that had almost paralyzed him in those last seconds, when he stood rooted in near panic as the gap between ground and platform increased. He consciously doesn't recall how difficult it had been to finally decide to go; to drop from the edge at the last possible second before the height would make it impossible to walk away unscathed. He doesn't consider the potential result had he waited too long, misjudged the distance and busted up his good knee.

He definitely doesn't look at the other possibility, that he might not have gone at all.

He’d allowed himself one thing though, one luxury for himself - he had let his eyes take in their last of her, fixed on her face until the rising lift cut off his view. What passed between them then...In one searching look _She_ had understood. She was on her feet and breathing, alive and home and that was enough. She hadn’t asked him for things that weren’t in his power to give; had not, in fact, asked _anything at all_ of him beyond what had been needed for their immediate survival.

And doesn’t that just scare the water right out of him?

The too sharp realisation forces him to shy away from even thinking of it, because there's still not enough distance between ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ for its safe observation. _His blood is in her veins now._ No one had demanded it of him but he hadn’t even hesitated to give of himself. Consequences be damned. His name though…That was given with the full knowledge that if she died anyway, if his last and best effort was simply not enough, that her face would join the rest of his demons. Her voice would whisper it to him in accusation for all time, and even so...He had given it to _Her_ freely, alongside his blood, in the desperate hope that both together would be enough to sustain her.

He thinks now, with something like amusement, that he would have probably drained himself dry for Her if the girl with the fire red hair hadn't stopped him; it was only because his strength had bled out of him too that she had been able to stop him at all. Her words are clear in his head, her voice still ringing above the cacophony of banshee song screaming through his head.

"You aren’t a thing either.”

She had gently – oh, so gently - taken his hands from where they still cradled Her head, even as someone else took his place. Red kept speaking to him, so so softly as one would to a skittish animal. "After all of this..." She gestured to encompass herself and the other Wives; the endless sand and the corpse of the Immortan; the Vuvalini; and Her, her head now held by the whip-thin girl with the bone white hair.

She’d brought him into her circle too, with his wild eyes and his hands clasped in her own. "She wouldn't want you to let yourself die for her. Not now, when we’ve come this far." And the other girl - Toast, he thought, the one who knew guns, so the only one whose name had stuck - had snorted and muttered something about knocking some damn sense into his fool head. The exact words were lost to him, but the smallest girl, the delicate one, chirped her agreement then, her eyes wide and shiny with tears. Waste of smegging water...

"Her colour's better." The voice of wisdom, that Vuvalini. "Temperature, too. Won't let her die on you either, boy."  
  
"Rest now," Red had said, pressing him down gently, so very gently. The other Wives echoed her softly, had offered him words meant to comfort and soothe, promises for when he woke.

He hadn't protested then; didn’t struggle when the grizzled woman clamped off the tubing rather than removing it completely - "Just in case." - and he’d let himself be gentled down beside _Her_. She had stirred, her flesh fingers twitching, and murmured something nearly inaudible.

_(Memory stirs. **She'd said...No**.)_

Red had taken Her hand and tucked it into his. The girl's skin as it brushed against his had been clean and softer than memories of silken down even after two days in the dust and sand. He could remember this only because _Her_ skin had been work rough and engine dirty; familiar and almost comforting; not quite as warm as it should have been but burned forever into memory. He had twined his fingers through hers without thought, holding on as tightly as he dared. His ghosts were silent; the only voice in his head was his own.

**_Please hold on. Please. Let this be enough, please...?_ **

It had echoed in his blessedly quiet head almost like a prayer. How desperate he must have been then, to fall back on such a thing.

Her fingers had tightened in his, just for a second, as if in answer, and her lips moved to shape a single syllable, more breath than voice.

_(He pointedly ignores his treacherous memories as they inform him of what he'd heard.)  
_

***

He wakes again, this time to the milky brightness of starlight and moonlight; and though his rest was untroubled by the accusing faces and the hands holding him down, he still comes up from it white knuckled and wild.

The wasteland is silent and still. His safeguards are untouched. He takes a breath, and then another, willing his fingers to uncurl and his shoulders to relax. Unlike most things he faces day to day, he cannot fight his way out of this.

The dream is blessedly fading, distilling into a single memory: her hand in his, her voice breathing his name.

She had said it. How else could he know the shape of it on her lips? How else could he know the way the sound of it vibrates on his skin and makes him tremble?

His eyes snap shut, tight enough that the stars above are echoed in the darkness behind his eyelids, and he covers his face with his hands to muffle the sound of his traitor voice. He will not let this sudden onslaught reveal his position; as serene as the shadowed wasteland may seem, he knows with surety that it most certainly is **NOT**.

The urge to run - **NOW** , as far as he can - is strong enough that he starts to hyperventilate. All the silent hours spent carefully building walls around his pain have come to nothing and memories bubble up from the long ago grief to seep into the depths of his secret innermost self. The dark haired woman, her face shadowed and lost to time but for the echo of an easy smile; and the burbling laughter of a small curly headed boy not yet old enough for the stripping of his innocence.

And then another, more feeling than image: _Their_ shattered bodies on the asphalt, and his insides twisting with rage and guilt.

He claws desperately for something, anything else, to drive them out. Glory the Child appears with her mother, faces superimposed over _Theirs_ on the road.  The splendid Wife falls from the Rig, her weakness his own fault. The Immortan's bloated carcass leers up at him. Even the sound of _Her_ breath rattling its last in her shattered chest...  
  
**_No._**  
  
And here is the one thing that he cannot give life to again. It is easier to see _Them_ broken and bloody than it is to feel _Her_ dying again beneath him. He can't see their faces clearly anymore, and he had wiped their names from history long ago…But _Her_ face, eyes so vividly green, are clearer than the stars over him now, and her name has somehow been branded beneath the surface of his skin. The shape of her hand in his - first in violence and then in solidarity, and finally in fragile existence after their almost assured deaths - is more real to him than the dying shadows of the past.

His hand curls into a fist and he brings it hard against the rusted out shell he has sheltered against, the pain of splitting skin a reflection of the guilt that poisons him. This, now, is the ultimate betrayal, and he feels them slipping away with a finality that wrenches his gut and proves that there are still pieces of his heart big enough to break.

* * *

 

> "Eyes I dare not meet in dreams  
>  In death's dream kingdom  
>  These do not appear:  
>  There, the eyes are  
>  Sunlight on a broken column  
>  There, is a tree swinging  
>  And voices are  
>  In the wind's singing  
>  More distant and more solemn  
>  Than a fading star."
> 
> -T.S. Eliot


	2. Chapter 2

>  "Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain.  
>  Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need."
> 
> \- Patrick Rothfuss. 

* * *

He wants to run. He wants to force his shitty stolen bike into gear and redline until the engine stutters and the tank goes dry, and then keep running until he himself goes dry. Food for the lizards, scrap for the scavs. Circle of smegging life.  
  
There hasn't been any time or place though, not since Before, when what he wanted has had any bearing on the reality of his circumstances, and for once this cruel truth works to his benefit. He simply doesn't have the resources to make _any_ kind of run, last or otherwise.  
  
Despite resolutely believing himself to be the most piss-poor and unworthy piece of shit in the history of the world, Before and After, ending his own miserable existence would be counterproductive to the blood music symphony in his veins.

**_Survive._ **

His head shuts down like electrical shorting out, but the primal drivetrain keeps him on his feet. This place is not sufficient for his needs and muscle memory takes over as he prepares his hasty camp for a longer stay.

His strength lasts long enough for him to dig out a shallow trench alongside the rusted out auto. Weathered canvas scavenged long ago from a military tent rolls over the top of the wreck, stones along three edges to keep it weighed down, brush and other debris scattered strategically over the whole. Hidden trip lines connect to a wind chime of sorts, cracked shells and broken bits of coloured glass hanging suspended over the place where he will lay his head.  
  
When his lizard brain is satisfied with the camouflage and the placement of his safeguards he crawls into his makeshift den and lets the darkness take him.

He sleeps like the dead, like Death itself, until the hurt is dull enough to bear again.

_(Unable to repair so much of themselves, his shattered memories simply wall themselves up where they can't be seen, hidden away for some future place and time when he might be stronger.)  
_

***

He stays in the hollow beside the wreck until his supplies dwindle almost to nothing, leaving the shelter of canvas and rust only to check his surroundings and to relieve himself. The safeguard line remains unmolested, not even a breeze to disturb the his makeshift alarm, and he wonders distantly if the death - execution? - of the Immortan has driven the usual wasteland carrion to ground.

He's never stayed so long in one place without at least one inquisitive scavenger intruding on his camp, but days pass and there is nothing, not even the distant whine of an engine drifting up from the wasted plain. The entire world seems to be resting in the space between one breath and the next.

Even his ghosts are quiet. He sees them. He acknowledges their presence even, the way one does when scouting the long borders of madness, but they do not speak to them and their silence is an odd comfort.

One afternoon when he ventures out for a particularly urgent piss, he sees a dust plume in the desert and the distant silhouettes of a convoy racing across the eastern plain. The vehicles are too far out for him to recognize. They're moving away from him, but not in the direction of the Citadel either. Between these facts and the immediate discovery of an untouched nest of the rarer, tastier lizard eggs, he puts the convoy out of his mind.

He devours three of the eggs as the sun crests the horizon and reburies the remaining two in the cooler sand beneath the wreck's remaining wheel well.

***

Another day. He sits beneath his canvas with his back against the flaking skeletal frame and breathes slowly. Deep breaths into his core and back out again. He imagines that they are like gusts of wind sweeping away dust from shadowed corners, exposing all the places where the madness could lurk.

A memory from Before bubbles up and suggests that he hold his hands just so, counsels that he should sit in a particular way; but there's no way in Old Joe's hell that his knee will tolerate it, and the same memory reminds him that he never had the patience to do this properly even when he might have had the ability. Waste of smegging time, but everyone'd been doing it...

It has been twenty-seven days now since he left _Her_ , but only seven of those since he fragmented into madness. He is still off kilter, and the new cracks in his heart are healing over too slowly. The guilt gnaws at him painfully, an abscess burning in his gut, but it isn't enough to push him back down into the healing sleep. 

He sits long enough in stillness for the lizards to disregard his presence as a threat and relax back into their usual behaviours - sometimes to their misfortune when he comes back from the quiet place and remembers that sometimes the pain in his stomach is hunger and very real.

Sun and stars blend together and he measures his remaining water in mouthfuls. He compartmentalizes his thoughts and adjusts his memory wherever he can to compensate for the new blank spaces.

 _She_ is there, but he doesn't trust himself yet to shape her name or let her face come to sharp focus. When he pushes down the memory of her eyes, Glory the Child skips across his line of sight, silent but for a long sigh and an expression of sorrowed pity on her face that speaks more than mere words ever can.

He sleeps and does not sleep. If he dreams, he doesn't allow himself to remember. Not yet.

He is like the wreck, he thinks, weathered and worn down, almost unrecognisable from what had been, but maybe something worth salvaging beneath the rust and the ruin. If he's only willing to work for it.

He's spent enough time in and around these derelicts that he knows full well that the odds are against him. Too much time has passed maybe, too late to try a restoration. He needs to try though, for...

_**No, not yet.** _

It's too much, and far too soon.  As long as doesn't admit it, if he fails here it's only his own time that's been wasted.

He breathes steadily until the jagged edges don't tear so badly at the wreckage of his sanity. He sits, lets the painful slivers come to the surface and draw out the festering sickness of grief and rage and failure that has poisoned him for so long.

He won't let himself see or hear her yet - he's still much too raw - but he holds on so very tightly to the memory of her hand in his.

* * *

 

> "First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain."  
>    
>  "Second is the door of forgetting...Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.”
> 
> “Third is the door of madness. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind."
> 
> "Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told."
> 
> -Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind


	3. Chapter 3

> "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.  
>  Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun,  
>  so must you know pain."  
>  -Kahlil Gibran

* * *

 

The world is different, today.

He wakes up fighting shadows in the early morning hours; his skin feels tight and the air beneath the canvas is thick and uncomfortably close. He feels the itch to move in his very bones, and the return of his restlessness informs him that he is a close to being put back together as he’s going to get.

He emerges to cooler air and a landscape lit by starlight. A thin sliver of moon hangs low in the west. The absent breeze has returned, ruffling his hair not unpleasantly as he pulls himself to his feet, the warm air carrying with it night sounds from the plain below.

He looks up at the sky and notes the swift progress of one of the ancient Before satellites. He watches it for a long time, until motion just at the edge of his vision demands his attention. His eyes dart to the side, fists coming up in defense as he turns sharply…

He lets his shoulders drop with a huff of embarrassed disgust.

A fluffy night-flying bird regards him with wide amber eyes from where it has landed atop the wreck. His memory supplies its name: it’s a moth owl. He hasn’t seen one for a very long time, had thought they were gone like most of the birds and animals from Before. The tiny owl bobs up and down, beak snapping at insects, and shuffles back and forth along the edge of the rusted frame. Years of hard caked dirt flake off the trim before the moth owl bursts into flight once more.

He hears phantom laughter behind him; doesn’t need to turn to know that Glory the Child has returned along with the wind and the wildlife. He nods an acknowledgement but doesn’t look, turning his face back towards the sky. Glory will still be with him when the sun rises, but he cannot know when he might next get the chance to just stare up into the dark.

The stars haven’t changed. He had known them all once, still recognizes the shapes if not the names. Standing beside the rusted out body of a car long abandoned _before_ Before, miles and years away from the place he started…He stares into the heavens until it strikes him that he can still find something beautiful there.

Unlike the last such revelation this new discovery doesn’t shake him down to his foundation. There are no hard points to it, nothing to drive him to his knees and the ragged edges of sanity.

Something like wonder softens his features as he continues to gaze up at the sky, the sparkling pinpricks of light going blurry and out of focus. Something warm slides down his cheek and he touches his face with shaking hands to find that he is weeping.

He closes his eyes and lets the tears come. His mouth curves into a smile and his shoulders shake with laughter. He stands beneath the star filled sky, laughing hysterically and half blinded by the tears. He thinks it must look like madness, but he knows there’s no one here to see him but the ghosts.

It doesn’t feel like madness. He isn’t sane, exactly – Glory dancing and laughing with him just at the edges of his vision is proof enough of that – but he isn’t crazy. His thoughts are clear. There are no dark spectres reaching from his memories to choke him, no cyclone of guilt to shut him down last time, no knife edged bloodrage to tint his vision red.  

It is nothing familiar, nothing he has known since the world ended.

He feels different, today. He doesn't want to pinpoint what the difference is, doesn't want to reach for too much and come up empty, but he feels…something. Like the ache of an encroaching dust storm, deep in his bones, he knows.  

_(It feels like hope.)_

* * *

 

> "Much of your pain is self-chosen.  
>  It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.  
>  Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity."
> 
> -Kahlil Gibran


	4. Chapter 4

 

>   “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
> 
> -Helen Keller.

* * *

The tears don’t stop for a long time.

He cries like a child, seven thousand days of loss pouring out of him; tears for the dead and the living who envy them, for the breaking of the world and all her blameless children. He grieves for them, every single one that he can’t remember and couldn't save. For the ones dead because he didn't help them, and the rest who died because he _did_.

He stands alone beneath all of star-filled eternity and the tears fall until he is empty. Then, and only then, he spares some for himself.

He cries at last for his own self, for his own losses and for all of the pieces of himself lost with everything he used to love. He cries for the pieces that remain too, for the shattered man left behind when the world died.

***

By the time his vision clears the moon has dipped below the long line of the western horizon. His eyes burn and itch like they've been sandblasted and the surrounding skin is tight and chapped, but he feels…Cleansed. He feels lighter all over, like some great and terrible load has been lifted from his shoulders. The full weight of all that unresolved grief and guilt has been crushing him for so long that he hasn't been able to stop moving, stop _running_ , for fear of going down under his own wheels. He can see it, now. He can admit to being afraid.

He huffs a derisive breath and feels, well, like a fool. Metaphysics, all that touchy-feely smeg, loose their purpose when the world ends. ‘Feelings’ don’t help him survive. He turned his heart to steel and hid behind his pain like armour, made himself heavy enough to hold against the flood. A man is weak, but a stone…A stone can stand resolute, a stone can be a tool or a weapon.

**_“You’re not a thing either.”_ **

The words ring out so clearly that he twists around to find the speaker, even though he _knows_ that she isn’t there. Even so…

Maybe she’s not wrong. Maybe he can remember what it means to be a man.

He rubs at his eyes, brushes his fingers through his hair. It might be okay, feeling something other than rage and guilt. Might be better than okay, maybe. It might be…Good. He doesn't exactly relish the prospect of relearning how to be a person, but he doesn't break into a cold sweat at the idea either.  

He pulls himself up onto the roof of the ruined car and is pleased when the brittle frame doesn’t give way beneath him; he stretches out and tucks his hands under his head.

_(He greets the dawn when it comes; it too is beautiful.)_

* * *

The speed at which he tears down his makeshift camp surprises him and he comes to the sobering realization that he has been here for several days without setting a single defence more sophisticated than the trip alarm. He mutters something like a prayer, thanking anyone that might be listening. He doesn't believe in God anymore but old habits don't die easy for him, even this one.

He hadn't intended on staying when he’d tucked himself down behind the wreck. It had been convenient shade in a defensible position, a gully at the top of a wind blasted crag just deep enough to conceal its existence from the plain below. The car itself had died before the world did, buried half way up the doors in sand and rusted out too completely for even the most desperate scavenger to bother with it.

After he pulls up his canvas he runs his fingers over the frame. This is his first close look at the thing and the shape of it pulls something from his memory. He thinks he remembers riding in a car like this, and something else that seems…important, somehow.  

He folds and rolls the canvas up and ties it back in its place on the bike. He coils up his carefully hoarded twine and tucks it inside the sleeve of his jacket; the little tangle of glass and shells goes into a small pouch on his belt. He has two canteens, both empty, and a half full jug of water to refill them with. Not much, but he thinks it should be enough to get most of the way back.

 _If_ that’s what he decides to do. He doesn’t know. He can't be sure what his reception will be. Despite his newly won measure of almost-but-not-quite sanity, he hasn't let her back into his thoughts yet. Her name might shatter him all over again.

 _(Glory glares at him whenever he deliberately doesn't think about her saying his name.)_  

***

He’s ready to leave. He doesn’t know why he hasn’t yet. The bike is substandard – he hadn’t been able to bring himself to take a better one – but it will get him where he needs to go. He has enough guzz to take his time about it, if he wants. Fuel for himself will be tight, and the water will be worse, but he’s stretched himself beyond his limits enough times in the past to not worry now.

 ** _Just get on the bike, kick into gear, and fang it, you fool_. ** He gives himself a shake and starts to put action to thoughts, but the smegging car refuses to release him. He turns his head to take a last look…

Glory is sitting on the roof, kicking her feet and sticking her tongue out at him.

He knows at the heart of matters that she and his other ghosts are nothing more than his damaged mind’s way of telling him things he should already know. He leaves the bike where it is, goes back to the wreck. He crouches stiffly beside the passenger door and digs into the sand. Glory claps in encouragement, cackling delightedly, and before too long he has moved enough of it away to try the door. He braces himself and pulls hard.

It gives with an ease he didn't anticipate; the hinge gives out and the door falls open at a haphazard angle. He ducks his head and looks inside.

Protected from the elements by its coat of sand, the front half of the car has held up more resiliently than the exposed back. The seats are intact, bits of upholstery clinging stubbornly amid slivers of broken glass. He picks up the largest piece with careful fingertips – someone out there would find a use for it, and it never hurt to have something to trade.

He pockets a few other things as well: a spring, a rubber washer, and the aluminium outer casing of a tire pressure gauge. A grime caked circle fished out of the ashtray reveals itself as a dollar coin when he rubs it against his shirt, and he can’t help but grin at the way it shines. And the most valuable of all…A tiny box containing four perfect matches.

Not bad for a little digging. Satisfied, he backs out of the wreck.

But before he can pull himself up, Glory points urgently at something behind him; he looks, and the glove box is still latched. He takes a deep breath and opens it gingerly, wary of nasty surprises lurking inside, but his caution proves unfounded. It is empty, with one notable exception.

It’s a small hinged box, red velveteen faded to brown and about the length of his hand. He tilts his head and frowns at it. There is _no_ reason for this to be here, and he is hesitant to open it. It feels wrong in his hand and his gut churns.

He wants to put it back and forget he saw it, but Glory _growls_ at him. He climbs out of the wreck and backs away from her.

This fear is irrational. There is nothing threatening about a box. He takes a shuddering breath and flips the tarnished metal catch. Inside on a bed of ivory satin rests a thin chain bracelet, delicate links of perfect butter-yellow gold. A single charm dangles from it, about the size of his pinky fingertip, and he inhales sharply when he realizes what it is.

A tiny golden tree in full leaf, a perfect miniature of a memory from a lifetime ago.

His indecision is gone and he knows, _knows_ with resolute certainty, where he is going. He climbs astride his bike. There is a peculiar tightness in his chest making it hard to breathe. The sound of his heartbeat is loud in his ears like wardrums. His foot comes down hard on the kickstart and the motor roars to life.

He doesn't look back to see Glory the Child waving goodbye. Everything he wants to see is in front of him. The rush of wind in his face is a key, opening the door that _She_ was waiting behind.

Her face snaps into sharp focus and her eyes are so very very green. Her lips form the one thing in all the world that he needs to hear.

**_"Max."_ **

***

He _is_ Max. And she...She is his Furiosa. 

* * *

> "What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us."  
>  -Helen Keller


End file.
